When I got home after a long twelve-hour shift at the clinic, the last thing I wanted to deal with was my front door. It was past eight in the evening, my feet were throbbing inside my nursing shoes, and the hallway light in my apartment building flickered in that annoying way it had done for months. I reached into my purse, pulled out my key, and pushed it toward the lock.

It hit something hard. I wiggled the key, tried to turn it, but the mechanism wouldn’t budge.

I leaned closer in the dim light, squinting at the brass keyhole. Someone had shoved a toothpick deep inside, breaking it off flush with the cylinder so the sharp wooden stump blocked the metal tumbler completely.

I stood there in the quiet hallway, staring at the door in disbelief. Who does that? Why would anyone jam a toothpick into my lock?

I didn’t have any spare lockpicks, and calling an emergency locksmith at this hour would cost me two hundred dollars I couldn’t really afford. Luckily, my younger brother, Leo, lived only ten minutes away in a small townhouse off Elm Street. I pulled out my phone and dialed his number. He picked up on the second ring, sounding half-asleep.

“Leo,” I said, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice. “I’m locked out. Somebody jammed a toothpick into my keyhole.”

Leo was at my apartment within fifteen minutes carrying a small tool bag and a flashlight.

He knelt on the industrial carpet, pulled out a pair of fine-nosed tweezers, and worked the broken wooden fragment out of the cylinder in less than a minute. Then he tested my key. The latch clicked smoothly, and the door swung open.

“All set,” Leo muttered, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Keep an eye on it. Might just be some neighborhood kids playing a prank, but it’s weird.”

I thanked him, gave him a cup of instant coffee, and thought that was the end of it.

I was wrong.

The very next evening, I hurried home from work, eager to kick off my shoes and heat up some leftover soup. I walked down the second-floor corridor, reached for my key, and stopped dead.

There it was again. A fresh piece of a wooden toothpick wedged tight inside the keyhole, sticking out just enough to mock me.

PART 2

I didn’t call Leo immediately this time. I stood in the hallway with my hand trembling on my handbag strap, feeling a cold knot twist in my stomach.

This wasn’t random neighborhood kids. Someone was doing this on purpose, targeting my apartment specifically, knowing I would come home tired and struggle to get inside.

I walked down to the lobby, borrowed a pair of sewing needles from Mrs. Gable in apartment 12, and managed to clear the lock myself after twenty minutes of sweating under the flickering hall light. Once I was safely inside with the deadbolt thrown, I called Leo back.

He arrived twenty minutes later, looking much more awake and a lot less amused than the night before. He walked out into the carpeted hallway, inspected the keyhole with his flashlight, and ran his fingers along the doorframe.

“Two nights in a row means someone has a schedule,” Leo said, crossing his arms over his chest. “They know when you’re leaving for your shift and when you’re coming home.”

“What do we do?” I asked, looking down the empty corridor. “I can’t afford a professional security camera system right now, and the landlord takes three weeks just to fix a leaky faucet.”

Leo tapped his chin thoughtfully. “I’ve got a small battery-powered security camera at my place.

It mounts with a magnetic bracket and connects to Wi-Fi. We can set it up across the hall.”

“Won’t the landlord or someone else notice it?”

“Not if we don’t put it in the hallway,” Leo said with a slight grin. “Your apartment faces the courtyard, and there’s that big old oak tree right outside your living room window. The branch comes within six feet of the glass. If we mount the camera up in the canopy, angled down toward your front door and porch area, nobody will ever look up to see it.”

We spent the next half hour working quietly. Leo brought down his ladder from his trunk, propped it against the bark of the oak tree in the dark courtyard, and climbed up into the lower branches. He positioned the small, dark-green camera casing among the thick leaves, aiming the lens precisely at my apartment entrance across the narrow concrete walkway.

“Connected to my phone and yours,” Leo whispered when he climbed back down and packed away the ladder. “All we have to do is wait for tomorrow.”

PART 3

The following day at the clinic, I couldn’t focus on my charts. Every time the lobby phone rang, my shoulders tightened. By the time my shift ended at seven, my hands were sweating on the steering wheel as I drove back to the apartment building.

I parked in my usual slot, walked across the courtyard, and checked my front door. Clear. No toothpick.

I unlocked the door, stepped inside, and immediately pulled out my phone. I opened the camera app Leo had installed and tapped the live playback log for the afternoon hours.

The video feed loaded with a slight blur, showing the quiet concrete walkway outside my door. I skipped backward through the timeline, watching the empty afternoon hours tick by in fast motion. Mail carriers walked past. A neighbor’s cat trotted across the landing.

Then, at four-fifteen in the afternoon, the screen showed someone walking up the stairs.

I froze, leaning so close to my phone screen that my nose nearly touched the glass.

It wasn’t a stranger. It wasn’t neighborhood kids.

The person standing in front of my door was Marcus, the superintendent’s assistant who lived down on the ground floor. He wore his usual gray work jacket, but in his right hand, he held something small and pale. On the video, I watched him step right up to my door, pull a wooden toothpick from his pocket, and deliberately press it into the keyhole until it snapped off. Then he brushed his hands together, gave a smug little glance up and down the hallway, and walked away down the stairs.

I stared at the screen until the glowing figures blurred. Marcus. The man who had smiled and waved at me just last week when I carried my grocery bags up the steps.

I didn’t waste time wondering why. I screenshotted the clearest frame of his face holding the toothpick, saved the video clip to my cloud drive, and dialed Leo.

“Get over here,” I told him, my voice shaking with a cold sort of clarity. “I found out who’s doing it. And bring your phone.”

ENDING

Leo arrived ten minutes later, and we didn’t bother waiting. We marched straight down to the basement office where the building management and the superintendent kept their records.

Marcus was sitting at the scarred wooden desk inside the office, eating a sandwich while watching a game on a small television. When we pushed the door open, he looked up, irritation flashing across his face.

“Office is closed for tenants,” Marcus said, chewing slowly. “Come back tomorrow morning.”

I didn’t say a word. I pulled out my phone, opened the video file, and laid the screen flat on the desk right beside his half-eaten sandwich.

The color drained from Marcus’s face so fast his skin looked gray under the fluorescent light. He stared at the moving image of himself pressing the toothpick into my door, his mouth opening slightly as the audio picked up the faint click of the wood snapping.

“Where… where did you get that?” he stammered, his eyes darting from the screen to Leo, who stood tall with his arms crossed in the doorway.

“We got it from the tree outside my window, Marcus,” I said, my voice quiet and steady in the small room. “Now, you’re going to call the property manager right now, explain why you’ve been vandalizing my lock two nights in a row, and hand over my spare building key deposit in full. Or I walk this video straight to the police precinct four blocks away.”

Marcus didn’t argue. He reached for his desk phone with a trembling hand, his eyes fixed on the floor.

I turned around, walked out of the basement office into the cool evening air, and waited for Leo to follow me back up the stairs.